From the bottom of this gugg
I went along a very undulating twin-way, into which, every thirty yards
or so, opened one of those steep putt-ways which they called topples,
the twin-ways having plates of about 2-1/2 ft. gauge for the putts from
the headings, or workings, above to come down upon, full of coal and
shale: and all about here, in twin-way and topples, were ends and
corners, and not one had been left without its walling-in, and only one
was then intact, some, I fancied, having been broken open by their own
builders at the spur of suffocation, or hunger; and the one intact I
broke into with a mattock--it was only a thin cake of plaster, but
air-tight--and in a space not seven feet long behind it I found the very
ill-smelling corpse of a carting-boy, with guss and tugger at his feet,
and the pad which protected his head in pushing the putts, and a great
heap of loaves, sardines, and bottled beer against the walls, and five
or six mice that suddenly pitched screaming through the opening which I
made, greatly startling me, there being of dead mice an extraordinary
number in all this mine-region.
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